


A History of the Study of the History of the Garden

by Calantian, ZScalantian



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen, Hollow Bastion | Radiant Garden, It's not quite Versailles and the year is not 1789 but it's getting there, Worldbuilding, cameos by other characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:54:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23226664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calantian/pseuds/Calantian, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZScalantian/pseuds/ZScalantian
Summary: Radiant Garden, and cycles of light and dark interpreted with less metaphysics, more class consciousness.  (It is better to light a candle, and all that, and better yet to get light bulbs and a water heater in every house.)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5
Collections: Worldbuilding Exchange 2020





	A History of the Study of the History of the Garden

**Author's Note:**

  * For [YvannaIrie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/YvannaIrie/gifts).



> There are KH3 spoilers in the Author's Notes at the end.

Ansem’s Report #1 (KH1):

_ Much of my life has been dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. _

_ That knowledge has guarded this world well. Not a soul doubts that. _

_ I am blessed with people's smiles and respect. But though I am called a sage, there are things I do not understand. _

_ I believe darkness sleeps in every heart, no matter how pure. Given the chance, the smallest drop can spread and swallow the heart. I have witnessed it many times. _

_ Darkness...Darkness of the heart. How is it born? _

_ How does it come to affect us so? _

_ As ruler of this world, I must find the answers. I must find them before the world is lost to those taken by the darkness. _

Secret Ansem Report #1 (KH2):

_ My efforts these many years have come to fruition, with the world I govern having become a paradise worthy of being called "Radiant Garden." _

_ Nurtured by the pure water that is the source of life, fragrant flowers bloom in abundance, and the people face each day with hopeful smiles. _

_ But where there is light, darkness also lurks. As noted in my earlier reports, I must solve the mystery of this "darkness of the heart." This paradise depends on it. _

The origins of the Garden were lost in the mists of time. Oh, there were fairy tales and myths and legends, but even the scholars of the Bastion had no solid archeological evidence. “Camelot,” some said, and others contended that the shining castle and its warrior-king with his magic sword, who’d driven off the darkness for decades before finally falling before it, were imported offworld mythology. (But it couldn’t be denied that if Arthur was a foreign myth, he’d been pretty influential - those archetypes showed up in a lot of Garden folklore.) When that old wizard Merlin happened to pass in earshot of these debates, the scholars noted, his eyes would twinkle behind his round spectacles, and his white mustache would twitch up in a grin.

Another camp held for “Baron,” and even its opponents had to admit that there had been a King Cecil and his wife Queen Rosa, who’d been succeeded by their son Ceodore - there were enough references to them in otherwise provable material to grant it. That Cecil had done the inverse of Arthur, bringing a kingdom from darkness to light… well, the metaphor was a fanciful embroidery, poetical nonsense, describing a king who’d modernized his country. And it certainly wasn’t the founding event of the Garden, even if the historical record indicated an explosion of airship technology around that time, just right for establishing a new world with.

“Daybreak Town,” said others, before being shouted down. Daybreak Town had become Scala ad Caelum, everybody who knew anything about other worlds knew _ that.  _ (And not many did know about them - the wielders of the key-shaped swords came often to the Garden , but they only rarely talked about their work or their home. Scholars at the Bastion considered themselves privileged to have access to records of interworld travel, and hoarded the secrets the keybearers gave them like dragons.) That the images of Scala ad Caelum’s whitewashed stone towers, beautifully rendered in washes of blue ink and gold foil on rich white linen paper, left in the Bastion’s library didn’t at all match the flower-adorned, slate-roofed, timber-framed houses in the pastel watercolors of Daybreak Town was not considered sufficient reason to upset the apple cart by questioning the keybearers’ homeworld mythology, even when the wielders were coming by less and less often.

It was true, though, that the Garden architectural style leaned toward timber-framing, with brick or plaster walls. The roofs were steeply pitched to deal with the frequent spring and autumn rainstorms, and boxes full of nodding, cheerful flowers decorated many a window. The town’s streets were paved with granite, the walls around the city were of basalt, and the castle was mainly of sandstone. Patches of parkland, with bedded plantings of annual and perennial flowers and manicured conifers, were plonked down anywhere they could conceivably fit.

Certainly, the Garden had had its rough periods, the scholars confessed, avoiding each other’s eyes. The town was not always as lovely as the sketches of Daybreak Town invariably were. Isolated above the world in the Bastion, there was a tendency for the scholars and nobility to grow insular, shortsighted, and dissolute. This resulted in starvation sieges, every few centuries, when the common people down below grew fed up with feeding the people in the towered castle. In these times, the parks became overgrown and weedy, and the water channels ran with green scum instead of clear water. The rising falls behind the castle had turned red with blood, more than once.

No one wanted to admit that they were leading to another such period. The queen was dead, her sister had eloped and gone off who-knew-where, and the nephew who’d succeeded the throne was far more interested in tumbling every girl who batted her eyelashes at him than running the country - and the late queen had been bookish and self-absorbed, so they hadn’t been in a good place to start.

It seemed to the scholars that, as they had crippled themselves with long hours at their desks, blinded themselves with hours spent bent over cramped and ancient books, bankrupted themselves gaining the knowledge necessary for admittance into the ranks of the Bastion - that they had paid their dues. Let the nobles, who had lucked into living here rather than earning it, earn their keep. It was  _ their _ job to look after the people, wasn’t it? The scholars were busy expanding the frontiers of knowledge!

There was a boy, though - the queen’s third cousin, once removed, or something. A very technically-minded boy, inclined more to the company of engineers and magicians than children his own age. Blond, orange-eyed, inquisitive, and far too fond of sneaking down into town for ice cream than the current political mood considered wise. When he wasn’t engaged in such clandestine adventures, he could often be found in the creaking basement boiler room, examining the piping and making scale models of more sophisticated pump systems.

It was a bad month in the Bastion when he began experimenting with the fountains - near every pipe in the castle backed up or burst. When he was fished out of a flooded bathroom and hauled before an aggravated king (who’d been fooling around with a dulcet maid in a separate bathroom, until the toilet exploded), young Ansem had this to say: “Knowledge is its own reward. For example, I now know that a mis-applied Blizzard spell can mean havoc for more than just the fixture it is cast upon.”

He was sentenced to confinement in his room for a month, and then no further experiments with the plumbing. On his release, though, it transpired that he’d spent his house arrest studying the chemical formulas of fertilizers, and he spent much of the next year mucking about in the gardens. This suited both the scholars and the nobility, as nearly all of them were ‘indoor’ sorts of people. So only a few noticed the boy continuing his trips into town, listening to the people grumble, and striking up a friendship with a fisher boy some years younger, whose parents fished the river below the falls.

Either he grew tired of the fertilizers, or he felt he’d learned enough, because he suddenly began haunting the library, reading every history and book of political thought he could get down on his own. (The gardening had encouraged the healthy growth of muscles, and Ansem was not a small youth to begin with, but some of the tomes in the Bastion’s collection required the strength of at least two to be drawn safely from the shelves.) He shared the results of his research with the fisher boy, who tended to laugh cynically and drop some cryptic comment that inspired more researching from Ansem.

The fisher boy took up archery, and Ansem tried his hand at it, but found himself lacking the necessary hand-eye coordination. A scholar and a builder, it seemed, but not a warrior. The fisher boy laughed at this too. 

Ansem, still rather young for it, began attending court sessions and observing the king’s judgements, when such rare events could be bothered to happen. He poked around the different departments of the scholars, from the basement laboratories to the drafty star observatory, watching, not talking. It made the scholars nervous, but a little eager too. The boy was brilliant, but a dilettante. If he could be persuaded to settle into  _ their  _ department, apply his brilliance to  _ their  _ subject…! they all seemed to think at once. Competitions, wagers, even a few scuffles broke out. But he didn’t settle anywhere, and the pattern kept on for years, until they accepted it as the norm.

They did notice that he did tend to talk to new arrivals to the Bastion, fresh invitees, and that gradually a coterie of young-ish people was forming around him. Weekly salons began to occur in his chambers, where these green and naive recruits talked not only of myth cycles and the freezing point of ammonium nitrate and the tensile strength of steel and the mixing of Fire and Thunder spells, but also of the high price of grain, and of the crumbling town walls. And, just as gradually, a few of the nobles began attending these informal gatherings.

And one day, near the entire group was gone. Given the inward focus of the Bastion, it actually took a few days to find where they went, when someone passed a westward-facing window and did a double take at the demolition near the west wall. Guards sent to investigate found a crowd of laborers shifting stones and toting pipes, and Ansem at the heart of it all, hair mussed, eyes dark-circled, up to his armpits in blueprints, and proud as a young peacock.

Dragged back to stand before the king for a second time, Ansem defended his project as standing on private property (a skinny scholar with tied-back blond hair and icy eyes was the owner, that young man volunteered, stepping forward from the observing crowd), that it was for the public good, and that it would be donated to the crown if it proved successful. 

“But what  _ is  _ it?” asked the king.

“A steam reactor,” said Ansem. “It ought to produce energy and hot water for everyone in the city. It’s unfair for only we up here to possess such comforts.”

And the king couldn’t really argue, with construction already started and an impatient, easily-angered crowd of workers gathered around the castle gates. And both the scholars and nobles could tell, a scale of power had tipped that day, in the throne room.

Later, when historians were arguing the origins of the Garden, there was a camp that pointed to that day. The day when it stopped being just “the Garden”, and started down the path to being “Radiant”, too.

**Author's Note:**

> I had no actual real headcanons for Radiant Garden, and I’m unfamilar with your other fandoms, YvannaIrie, so I panicked a wee bit on receiving the assignment. But I did have a couple loose-floating notions about Radiant Garden’s history that I hammered into shape to make this.
> 
> The first one was that as modern Radiant Garden was the Final Fantasy character’s homeworld, then the past RG was home to other FF characters, from the more medieval-fantasy games in the series - hence the reference to FFIV’s Cecil, Rosa, and Ceodore, and their home country of Baron. The second was that I wanted Merlin to appear - is he time traveling? World hopping? Both? We just don’t know! So maybe Camelot and The Sword in the Stone is the history of Radiant Garden, and maybe it’s not. The third was that, when χ came out, I really thought (and continued to think right up until the reveal about Scala ad Caelum) that Daybreak Town was RG in the past, because the Tudor-style architecture, layout around a central plaza with a castle looming in the background, and abundant floral growth looked alike. (Bear in mind that Birth by Sleep is my defining mental image of RG, not the KH2 version.)
> 
> Writing this, I actually started out with Kairi’s grandma as the main character, casting her as one of the Bastion’s scholars, because we need more kickass old ladies in fanworks (and everything) but couldn’t find any good place to stop writing and end her story. Instead, it turned into a piece about Ansem’s ascension to the throne, because his report quotes were easy to build on… so I sure hope you at least don’t mind the fellow! I find him quite interesting, though not necessarily likable. (Hurting Naminé makes me real, real mad.)
> 
> The fisher boy is Braig - I picked up the notion of him as from a fishing family from Rabbitprint’s A Sorrow of Magpies, which remains the only Org. XIII -focused work I really enjoy, even if 3/4 of it is now noncanon. Of course, there’s the question of whether he’s original Braig… or Luxu. (How does Luxu’s body hopping work? Is he reincarnating, or going the Xehanort body-possession route? Again, we just don’t know! KH is both very fun and very frustrating, in many ways!) The skinny scholar with icy eyes is, of course, Even. I try not to worry too much about KH character’s ages, but I guess I think Ansem, by KH2, is late 50’s/early 60’s; Xigbar a hale 50; and Vexen mid- to late 40’s. 
> 
> The royal family are not cameo characters, I just made them up off the top of my head.


End file.
